Why is pop culture obsessed with battles between good and evil. Traditional folktales never were. What changed? Catherine Nichols writes a really interesting essay about how contemporary storytelling differs to traditional, but more than this, her thoughts extend to ideas about the stories we tell ourselves at a cultural level, specifically the moralising quality of modern stories, and the consequences thereof... "Less discussed is the historic shift that altered the nature of so many of our modern retellings of folklore, to wit: the idea that people on opposite sides of conflicts have different moral qualities, and fight over their values. That shift lies in the good guy/bad guy dichotomy, where people no longer fight over who gets dinner, or who gets Helen of Troy, but over who gets to change or improve society’s values."